For example, in an operation for carcinoma excision, it is required to confirm tissues of an organ developing a cancer and to study how deep the organ should be excised. In such a case, a tissue specimen prepared by slicing a part of the organ is observed.
By the way, although tissue specimens are ordinarily treated with paraffin substitution, there is not enough time to conduct paraffin substitution when a tissue specimen is rapidly prepared during operation or the like.
Thus cryostats for rapidly preparing tissue specimens while organs are frozen have been conventionally known.
The cryostat includes a chamber for freezing a pathological tissue (hereinafter, it may be simply called a sample), and in the chamber, a microtome for slicing the sample while the frozen state is held is provided (For example, Patent Literature 1).
The microtome includes a head holding the sample, a cooling device for maintaining the sample held by the head at a lower temperature than in the chamber, and a blade for slicing the sample held by the head (For example, Patent Literature 2).
In addition, the microtome has an alignment mechanism which aligns the head to align the sample relative to the blade for slicing (For example, Patent Literature 3).